Brainstorming with art

Well, I spent a day prototyping that zombie match-3 game that was mentioned previously. It turned out as I expected. The game is basically a cross between Pizza Chef and King's Guard, where rather than drop pizza onto the board, you drop weapons to create units to form an army. It actually played fairly well, even with 80s style programmer art.


(red rectangles are allies, black rectangles are the invading enemies)

...Actually the past couple days were mostly spent on drawing and painting. I mimicked some of the art styles found in Chibi Knight, Ninja Brawl, and OMG Zombies, to create some main menu designs...





Then I did some character design based on a new game called God of Fight. I managed to animate him in a background I whipped up.



It feels very natural. I am eager to add some attack animations and enemies that use the same animation set.

This gladiator consists only of single-frame body parts that are animated like a paper doll, which makes it incredibly easy to create additional body parts for variation. In other words, I do not have to redraw anything so it saves a lot of time! I have some code that can dump the transformation data from a Flash movieclip to Lua, so it's extremely memory-friendly on mobile devices.

I can really see myself developing some kind of hack & slash game like Castle Crashers, featuring three distinct heroes to choose from. Realistically, most of the work is in the art and design. The programming should be really straight forward, and therefore, easy to port from Flash to mobile using Corona and Lua.

My only concern is choosing a theme. Fantasy is probably the most popular. Zombies, pirates, ninjas, and vikings are also really interesting. Well, whichever I choose, there is always time for another one! This is shaping up to be a 4-6 month project, but frankly, I would rather pursue this over two smaller games that rely on some gimmick.